Ending collaborations with FHI and Sculpting Evolution

BERI has ended our formal collaborations with Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (effective May 5) and MIT’s Sculpting Evolution group (effective July 10).

The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) was shut down by the University of Oxford on April 16. I’d known that this was a possibility since early 2023, but it wasn’t until March of this year that I heard the official decision. At that point we started to wind down all of our existing commitments to FHI researchers, the last of which ended on May 5. For FHI’s perspective on their shut down, see their memorial page.

FHI had a long history before BERI even started, and they were one of our first three university collaborators. While the last couple of years have been difficult at times, I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish with them, including supporting early work form Robert Trager on AI governance and Owain Evans on Truthful AI, and rapidly spinning up forecasting and evaluation of nonpharmaceutical interventions during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Sculpting Evolution group is not shutting down—they just don’t need BERI anymore. Within the first year of our collaboration it was clear that their plans would ultimately lead to the creation of an independent 501(c)(3) (now called SecureBio) which would replace and expand on the type of support BERI specialized in providing. Now that SecureBio has become a mature organization with a full complement of staff, it was the right time to end our formal collaboration and grant them the remaining budget of approximately $25,000.

I’ve been continually impressed and encouraged by SecureBio’s important work, and I’m proud that BERI was able to accelerate the early stages of that work. While this grant ends BERI’s formal relationship with SecureBio and Sculpting Evolution, I personally remain a member of SecureBio’s board, and I look forward to working with them more in the future.